Conservation monitoring seminar in Bren

Friday, Dec. 4, 2009
1:30 - 2:30 p.m.
Bren Hall 1424

"Optimal Monitoring for Conservation"

Hosted by Bruce Kendall

Abstract

Conservation science is booming, but how rigorously are we making our decisions? In this talk, I will discuss how my research group has been using decision-theory tools to pose and solve a variety of real-world conservation problems. More specifically, this talk will focus on our work on optimal monitoring. Forget everything you learned about statistics and monitoring for pure ecology, and think about questions such as: How much data we need to make decisions? Is monitoring sometimes too expensive? Do null hypotheses have any place in applied ecology? I conclude that applied monitoring is first and foremost an optimization problem.